


Greywing

by Inisheer



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, az and crowley show up eventually, gen because them being in love isn't relevant to this fic, how did raphael get a character tag without actually being in good omens, many footnotes, mention of child prostitution, shameless book and tv canon blending, they are though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 07:54:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19330294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inisheer/pseuds/Inisheer
Summary: There’s a theory going around the fandom that Crowley was once the Archangel Raphael. Maybe so, maybe no. If not, it raises a question: where IS Raphael?





	1. The Day the World Didn't End

On the day the world had been intended to end, Raphael arrived late to work. She also arrived late to the apocalypse, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Raphael did not look like an angel. Not that angels are _supposed_ to look like angels, when they’re on Earth, what with the wings and eyes and all, but Raphael didn’t look like an angel pretending to be a human either. They tend to go overboard on the expensive fabrics or wear the same coat for two hundred years. Sometimes they slip up on the eye thing.

Right now, Raphael wore jeans. And a mauve crew-neck. And gladiator sandals, for old times’ sake.

She had a white coat, the doctor-ish kind, folded over her arm[1].

The figure in front of her on the quiet Roman street did look like an angel. Tailored suit (down to the peaked lapels), strong jaw, deafening aura. Raphael almost expected him to break out in celestial harmonies.

‘Hi, Gabe,’ said Raphael. ‘What’s up?’

The Archangel Gabriel spluttered. Raphael was not the only being in Creation who would have dared to call him “Gabe”, but she was the only one who actually did it.

‘Do you know what _day_ it is?’ Gabriel snapped.

‘Uh. Saturday?’

‘Armageddon. It’s the day of Armageddon, _Raph._ The day the legions of Heaven will ride out against the forces of Hell in glorious battle and wipe the demons from Creation. That day. The one you’ve known about for six thousand years.’

Raphael hummed and made a show of checking her watch.

‘So would you care to explain why you _missed roll-call_? Did you get lost? Did you somehow forget?’

She shrugged in Gabriel’s general direction. ‘Busy.’

‘You can’t be busy, it’s the end of the world.’

‘They don’t know that yet.’ Raphael looked Gabriel square in the eyes, and he recoiled a little. ‘I’ll be there when I’m needed. I’ll be _where_ I’m needed.’

‘You’re needed on the battlefield. Now.’

He said this with the tone of an order, but a shaky one. Raphael raised an eyebrow. She was a very good eyebrow-raiser – in fact, she had invented eyebrow-raising, in the earliest days of the Heavenly Council Meetings, for more or less this purpose[2]. Keeping it up, she took half a step forward. ‘Oh? Are you my boss now? Do I look like some seraphim or principality you can push around? Or have _you_ forgotten that I am an Archangel too?’

‘There is a Plan,’ said Gabriel, churlishly.

‘Yes. Presumably. In the meantime, I’ve got work to do.’

She neatly sidestepped Gabriel and continued on towards her workplace, which was through a blue door some yards away.

Gabriel muttered a string of very un-angelic insults before disappearing. Raphael didn’t look round, but breathed a sigh of relief[3] when she felt his presence fade. She shrugged on her coat, reclipped a loose strand of red hair (like many angels, Raphael had curly hair, currently tied back), and marched briskly in.

Usually, Raphael’s entrance at the clinic garnered some reaction: shouts of ‘Ciao!’ from the receptionists, a stream of updates from the nurses, files pressed into her hands (and, if she was lucky, a macchiato) and the like. Today, both the staff and the patients arrayed on the plastic chairs ignored her arrival. Everyone’s attention had been claimed by the TV screen fixed to one ceiling corner, which showed blurry images of a deep-sea behemoth devouring a boat. An old lady clutching a rosary prayed to God for mercy.

_She’s not listening. But I am._

Raphael stepped forward and placed her hand on a patient’s shoulder. The teenage girl jumped and glanced up at her.

‘Noli timere,’ said Raphael, then, remembering, ‘Non avere paura.’ She smiled. The girl smiled shakily back.

It might be the end of the world, but life went on. Raphael had to distract each of her patients from the topic. ‘Atlantis, yes, that’s a turn-up! Now you said on the phone it burns when you pee?’ Or: ‘Makes you wonder about every lemon you’ve ever eaten, doesn’t it? All right, you’re about eight weeks along, which means it should be quite straightforward to arrange a termination.’

They clutched at her hands with fear in their eyes, even the ones who’d only come in for a smear test or to renew their prescriptions, and Raphael flashed her beatific smile and the fear diminished, a little. None of them could have said why they found her presence so reassuring. She looked like any other doctor, albeit one with an impressively clean coat.

Several thousand miles away, Armageddon gathered pace.

Raphael paid it no attention until – ‘Oh.’ Her current patient gave her a concerned look. Raphael rushed the woman through the end of the appointment, sent her off for a round of antibiotics, and collapsed back in the chair. She shut her eyes. To an onlooker it might have appeared she was in distress, but what Raphael was in fact doing was _listening._

‘Oh, dear,’ she muttered.

She collected herself and called in the next patient. After the last, she made her excuses hastily and departed.

Lesser angels are restricted to the limits of the body they occupy, more or less, but this is no concern for an Archangel. They can discorporate and recorporate at will: someone else will deal with the paperwork. Raphael discorporated in Rome and recorporated, a wing-beat later, in London.

She landed in the burned-out shell of a bookshop and looked around with no apparent concern for the fact that, despite the best efforts of the London Fire Brigade, it was still lightly smoking. The firefighters, in turn, failed to see the tall woman who had materialised in their midst.

‘Oh, _dear_ ,’ she said.

Raphael tossed her coat on the back of a charred shape that had once been a chair, fixed another loose strand of hair, and bent to scrub out a series of arcane markings on the floor. When it had been sufficiently obscured – traces were still visible, but nothing was _getting through_ , which was the important thing – she picked up her white coat, which was spotless, and disappeared again.

Heaven was unchanged from her last ten thousand visits. Oh, they’d added views of a new Earthly tower and brought in different door filigree, but that was detail. It was still scentless, airless[4], endless. They should have put maps on the walls, Raphael grumbled to herself: it was Hell finding anyone in a hurry in the arching, empty halls.

She finally stumbled across a contingent of cherubim halfway through South Pacific, holy weapons deposited in a pile, who told her what floor she was on and pointed her towards Michael’s last known location. When she got there, a clerk gave Raphael further directions. By this point, Raphael thought she could hear Michael, but it was hard to pick out any one angel – even a fellow Archangel – among the cacophony of angelic presences. They really had called everyone in.

For the same reason, Raphael tried not to be too concerned that she couldn’t sense Gabriel’s wayward principality in the crowd. They’d shared Earth so long he was more familiar than her fellow Archangels – or perhaps simply more distinctive – but he was still only a principality. She couldn’t even identify _Gabriel._

One of Raphael’s own principalities caught up with her just as she spotted Michael, in a huddle with Uriel and Sandalphon. Raphael wavered, then turned to the quivering angel.

‘Raph, boss, we’ve got new orders. Says here we’re being reassigned.’ He shook the golden memo at her and Raphael snapped it from his hands before he could shake it into oblivion. ‘We can’t go to _battle_ I don’t know how to fight I thought we were being kept back for medical support I thought we weren’t even going to _be_ there –’

Yes. There had been an arrangement. Then, apparently, there had been a unanimous vote, six-to-absentee, overwriting Raphael’s command of her domain due to a State of Emergency clause she was almost certain they’d just rubber-stamped.

Bastard. Commandeering members of _her_ domain?

Not that it looked like anyone was setting off for the battlefield in a hurry.

She marched down the corridor to the gang of Archangels. The huddle disintegrated and they realigned themselves to face her.

‘Look who finally decided to show up,’ said Uriel.

‘Where’s Gabriel?’

Michael rearranged her features into an expression of almost-convincing apology. ‘He’s not here at the moment. He’s in Tadfield.’

‘Where the Hell’s that?’

But she knew. The English-villageness rang true in the name; it whispered of apples and golden summer days and London just far enough away on the horizon. An unassuming place. There was only one reason Gabriel would have gone there, at this juncture.

‘It’s – I suppose you should know – where the antichrist showed up. There have been some…’ Michael looked at the others for help.

‘Minor snags,’ offered Uriel.

‘Teething problems,’ Sandalphon said, flashing his, which were square and white and seemed too many for his mouth.

‘Yes. Not to worry. Gabriel will get it sorted out and then we’ll get moving,’ said Michael. ‘I _am_ looking forward to the battle. Aren’t you, Raphael?’

Raphael didn’t dignify that with an answer. Her people. Her domain. Thrown onto the battlefield with no preparation, like so much shark chum. Like the boy. But it had been the right way – it had been the only way – hadn’t it? She had never dared to expect he would turn down the hellhound or the power. Hoping was not the same as expecting. _Minor snags._ It might be all right, if –

‘Where’s Aziraphale? He came up here, didn’t he?’

‘Who?’ said Sandalphon.

Uriel whispered, audibly, ‘That annoying principality – the one who lost the antichrist.’

‘Went back down again. Discorporated. We’ll find him,’ said Michael, in the tone of a headmistress forced to admit she had misplaced a student.

Raphael burst out laughing.

‘I’m sorry,’ she lied. ‘Is losing the antichrist a minor snag?’

‘This isn’t funny.’

‘Atlantis and sherbet lemons and – wherever Tadfield is? Was that all part of the Plan? Wow. You’re making a right hash of Armageddon here.’

‘Shut up,’ said Uriel.

‘I’m sure God is going to be _so_ impressed with your work,’ said Raphael. ‘Though who knows? Maybe this is how She arranged it. We’ll have to ask… When we hear from Her again.’

The others looked uneasy. At least, Michael and Uriel did; Sandalphon never looked anything but ready to smite people, or demons in a pinch. Raphael’s laughter petered out. She smiled – not her angelic smile, but a slow secret smile that said: _Yes. Exactly what you’re thinking. And you’ll never prove it._

Whatever God might or might not have arranged, someone else would have done the heavy lifting.[5]

Raphael changed the subject back to the matter of her own domain, and was arguing the finer points of legislature with Uriel when Gabriel returned.

He barely looked defeated. No slope in the shoulders, schooled expression. Only the heaviness of his footfalls gave away his mood.

‘It’s off,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to war.’

‘Not going to war?’ Sandalphon echoed.

‘Kid says no, what can you do? What are _you_ doing here?’ he added to Raphael.

‘Thought you wanted me here.’

Gabriel scowled at her. ‘Stop looking so smug.’

She didn’t.

It was all very anti-climactic. Raphael hung around while the end of the world – ended. She watched through one of the globes with a gaggle of minor seraphim as Lucifer departed from the disused human airfield on which the fate of the world had so narrowly balanced, followed by everyone else. Afterward she helped send the lesser angels back to their various stations across the mortal and immortal realms. Twenty-four hours in she was ready to smite whoever was responsible for the music selection (her alternative suggestions had gone down like so many lead balloons – no, not even the Beatles) and more than ready to go home, so she was not at her best when a harried power alerted her in panic to Gabriel’s most recent stupid decision.

When Raphael marched into the justice chamber, armed with six thousand years’ worth of precedent pertaining to the right for a full trial, she found – Gabriel, Uriel and Sandalphon, so beside themselves they’d started to blur.

No Aziraphale. Not alive, not dead, not – the after-echoes still vibrated round the chamber – not here at all. The only beings to have recently departed were two demons.[6] One of them was familiar. An old familiar, from a long time ago.

As noted, Raphael was not at her best. She snorted before composing herself.

‘What has he become?’ Gabriel muttered, apparently to himself. ‘What has he become?’

Raphael folded her arms. ‘What have you?’

 

* * *

 

 

[1] “Folded” is a strong word. “Messily draped”, perhaps, or – if you want to be really critical – “thrown”.

 

[2] She had never been properly credited for this. Most believed the inventor had been an unassuming low-level demon. Raphael could have found a way to justify eye-rolling as an act of Good and contributing to the Celestial Plan, but she knew when to pick her battles.

 

[3] Raphael didn’t need to breathe, but she’d realised early that humans found it disconcerting if they noticed she wasn’t. Later it had become a habit. There was something soothing about it, the inflow and outflow of air reminding her she was still on Earth and not – elsewhere.

 

[4] Not a figure of speech – there is no air in Heaven. Nor in Hell. It made Raphael feel out of breath. She knew this was impossible, but the bit of her that knew wasn’t the bit doing the feeling.

 

[5] Angels do not typically subscribe to the notion that God works invisibly or directly upon events on Earth and human minds. It would appear to rather undermine the fact of their own existence: if she could do it all herself, what would she need angels for? That’s a complex theological debate and, suffice to say, extraneous to Raphael’s current understanding of the situation.

 

[6] Raphael took a moment to be grateful that six thousand years and change of telling them to _listen_ had gone unheeded because, of course, they didn’t listen.


	2. Eleven Years Earlier

It had been a long six and a half centuries.

There had to be an antichrist, so he[1] could end the world. Then there would only be Heaven and Hell, angels and demons, the good and damned, and they could battle as they had in the Beginning without all that messy humanity getting in the way.

Raphael knew all about the Plan. She’d known about it since the Garden. Raphael also knew about humans, in all their messy, complicated, fallible glory: she’d been learning about them since the same. According to the Plan, they were only around for Heaven and Hell to prove their relative worth against. A scoreboard freefalling round a middle-aged star on a rather uninspiring existential plane.

Raphael, Archangel of healing, who had responded to the prayers of the suffering and walked under that yellow star where it was called the sun – disagreed.

That had been a terrible realisation, some centuries ago (probably the fourteenth): the awareness of her own doubts. Angels did not have doubts. Angels knew what came of doubts. Yet instead of the expected damnation there had been.

Silence.

Stillness.

She had not Fallen.

That came with a more terrifying realisation again. If Raphael could open her mouth and say, ‘This is wrong,’ and God did not strike her down, then God would not strike any of them down. Nobody had heard from Her since Calvary. She had, for whatever reason, left them to their own devices.[2]

Raphael had gone to Ireland, and got as drunk as possible until the plague came along and shook her out of self-pity. Afterwards, she had gone back to Heaven, and pretended she was still all-in on the Plan, and as far as she could tell the other Archangels had believed her.[3]

In the meantime, she had made plans of her own.

Or perhaps “plan” was too strong a word. What Raphael had – what she had so carefully hidden even the slightest intent of from her peers, praying with all that remained of her faith they thought her merely reluctant – was to a plan what a match on a hillside is to a rescue beacon. A stone’s ripple versus a tsunami. A housecat facing down an enraged tiger. It was the best she had.

The last nine months had been particularly tense. Raphael hadn’t slept, and she’d still barely had time to keep up. There had been a lot of activity on backchannels, for a start. The secret nods and winks and deals that weren’t really _deals_ per say, more “conveniently convenient for both sides”, were ramping up as the hour of reckoning approached. Raphael was officially[4] supposed to know about the existence of backchannels but not the details. Those were on a need-to-know basis.

The details were critical to figuring out Heaven and Hell’s respective plots, and Raphael had resorted to spying sometime around the Inquisition. The nerve-wracking bit had been keeping track of what the others thought she knew about backchannels while simultaneously figuring out what was actually going on: but she’d been walking that wire for centuries and hadn’t fallen yet.

She’d had one stroke of luck, when the Archangels decided they had no intention of letting Hell take all the credit for the antichrist’s existence and volunteered her for midwife duty. The tricky part _then_ had been keeping a straight face. Nothing else could have put her in a stronger position to learn what they planned to do with the infant antichrist upon arrival.

Though it did mean she’d had to deal with Lucifer.

Lucy.

In the flesh. Or whatever.

He’d channelled all the worst paranoias of every expectant parent in history. Not that he actually _cared_ about the baby, as a person, as far as Raphael could tell. He didn’t seem to be entirely clear on what people _were._ (He hadn’t always been like that; Raphael guessed his Fall had driven him insane. A different kind of insane from most angels, and from most demons.) But the Plan – good grief, he was as insufferable as Gabriel about the thought of anything going wrong with the Plan, and a damn sight harder for Raphael to interact with. She’d never been as close to Gabriel as she had to Lucifer, before his Fall, and she didn’t owe Gabriel one (1) assault with a flaming sword.

And he’d never bloody apologised. Not that she’d expect a demon to apologise. But it was the principle of the thing.

It had meant a lot of time tending to the expectant mother. This wasn’t much of a chore, since she at least was quite pleasant and the pregnancy had been uncomplicated, but getting called away from other business because the Lord of Hell didn’t know babies _kicked_ had started to grate.

It was almost over. Soon she’d have eleven years to catch up on her missed sleep, and what happened at the end wasn’t on her. Until then, Raphael still had to do her day job. Both of them.

One night as the end of nine months drew near, after a long shift in a Russian oncology ward, Raphael swapped her gleaming doctor’s coat for fresh one and travelled the width of the planet – a few wing-beats as the Archangel flies – to a small library at the edge of a small New Jersey town.

Inside, a handful of harried librarians helped visitors fill out forms and tried to keep them away from the computer corner. Of four free computers, one was currently in use, and nobody wanted to share breathing space with the user. When he wasn’t coughing, he was sneezing without covering his mouth, and when he was doing neither he was hacking up great gobs of spit with an impressive velocity and range. Despite looking and sounding like an escapee from the ICU, and between wiping sweat from a pallid brow, he fervently typed out an online tirade about the dangers of – spin the wheel – lead in diphtheria vaccines.

‘Hello, Pestilence,’ said Raphael.

Pestilence sneezed on her. Or tried to, anyway. He went crossed-eyed looking at his nose, which had suddenly dried up to encrusted snot.

‘Would you look at that. You’re on the road to recovery,’ Raphael continued. She lifted the personification of human suffering bodily by the collar and slammed him against the end of the nearest bookshelf.[5] [6]

She leaned in, and Pestilence went green. Greener than he’d been to start with.

‘What part of _retired_ do you not understand?’ Raphael hissed. She flashed the eyes, the angel eyes, which reflected fire in a dark room and promised judgement. Then she let go.

Pestilence slithered away in a cloud of miasma, and Raphael straightened her purple cardigan. He’d be back. There was enough human – or – enough sort-of-sentient _whatever_ Pestilence was for fear tactics to work temporarily, but not enough to hold him. Dear God, she’d tried. Six thousand years she’d been trying.

Raphael waved the blog blank.[7] Since she was in the area, she might as well do some good deeds, and sought around for possible candidates. She had cured two kids of measles and was working on nudging a woman to remember her grandma’s horror stories about polio when Hastur sidled up.

‘Baby’s coming,’ he said.

Raphael wrinkled her nose. ‘What, already? Fine. Just move downwind, would you?’

In the delivery room, which was among the finest in Creation, she found Lucy hovering. He’d gone for a sharp black suit and patented gaunt expression. Rounded pupils. Unlike the bulk of demons, the Devil himself could pass for human as well as most angels, if you ignored the way the end of his sleeves blended into his flesh.

Raphael chased him out. She could still hear him vibrating with anxiety from the other side of the door, but at least the expectant mother couldn’t, and she calmed at Raphael’s gentle smile. The poor girl was confused about what Lucifer was doing there, anyway: she was under the impression she was carrying the next Son of God, not the antichrist.[8]

The birth was easy, the baby perfect. Ten fingers, ten toes, golden hair, no tail. Human, not demon. How could he have been? Only God can make a demon, and only humans make humans. Demons cannot create. No more can angels. What Lucifer had done, strictly speaking, was shave off a part of himself and graft it on to the place that would become the infant soul.

It counted, as parenthood went. Raphael dropped the baby in Lucifer’s arms. If he was going to play concerned father, he could bloody well act like one. The Morningstar, King of Hell, known to some as Satan and others as Old Nick, recoiled from the seven pounds of newborn human in his lap.

‘You wanted him alive,’ said Raphael. ‘Here he is. Alive and kicking.’ The antichrist kicked on cue. ‘Oh, how cute! He hates you already.’ She scooped the baby up before Lucy could drop him or decide to strangle him and delay the Plan another thousand years, and rewrapped the blanket, humming gently. The baby dozed off.

Human. He would have the power of their stock, in some part, but with the unique gift of those who are born rather than made: choice.

Now she only needed Sister Mary Loquacious to avoid excommunication for another two weeks[9] and fuck up at exactly the right moment.[10]

 

* * *

 

[1] Or she. Raphael had half-hoped the baby would be a girl. She wasn’t exactly a woman herself – being an angel, the concept hardly applied – but unlike some she wouldn’t name out of courtesy[1+] her choice to appear as one had been more than a coin-toss. Heaven had been encouraging the oppression of half of humanity since they pinned the whole Garden thing on Eve, and it wasn’t a good look. Not that a female antichrist would have exactly been _redemptive_ , if she did her job and ended the world, but at that point it would have hardly mattered and it would have tweaked some halos in the meantime.

 

[1+] *Cough* Uriel. She was thinking of Uriel. Not Michael, though, whose reasons she’d never quite ascertained.

 

[2] And their Devices, but Raphael didn’t know about _them._

[3] Except possibly Michael.

[4] Not that backchannels officially existed, but on the official side of unofficially, as opposed to the unofficial side of unofficially on which Michael didn’t trust her. Gabriel still appeared to, though: he just thought she was soft. And Gabriel was in charge.

 

[5] Raphael at this point resembled a tall and reasonably sturdy woman, but not one who could lift a two-hundred-pound mass of condensed pathology one-handed without apparent effort. Remember: Archangel. There are _some_ advantages.

 

[6] Nobody paid any attention. Whether this was because Raphael had ensured they wouldn’t or simply because they’d all been hoping someone would give Pestilence a good thrashing since he dripped snot on a visiting pre-school class earlier in the day is left for the reader to decide.

 

[7] Knowing little about computing, Raphael in fact managed to delete Pestilence’s blog so thoroughly that search engines would auto-refresh themselves upon being asked to look for it. Entering the domain name directly would cause any operating system to crash, with the exception of the particular version of Linux installed on the office computer of one antiquarian London bookshop, which would instead redirect to A. Z. Fell’s homepage: a rare books auction site. At this point several engineers investigating the issue threw up their hands and turned to easier problems, like getting hired by Google.

 

[8] Raphael spied Gabriel’s hand in that particular illusion. It had been poetic overkill, in any case, since the child had slept with – lain with – _there had_ _been_ many men in her fairly recent past. Holy water was not painful enough for whoever had decided the appropriate foil for a married maiden was an unmarried sex trafficking victim. Or hellfire, if Raphael’s darkest suspicions were correct.

 

[9] That was another candidate for Worst Part Of The Last Few Months: making sure Sister Mary Loquacious didn’t get booted every five minutes. God, she’d memory-wiped that abbess so many times, she was starting to worry she’d inflict permanent damage.

 

[10] Who cared for the baby in the interim, you ask? His mother, of course. Raphael returned, later, and cleared her memory of the preceding months, and undid the physical signs of pregnancy, and summoned up a paper trail that would allow the girl to be placed with a good foster family. She justified all this to a heavenly clerk as track-covering. Then she went back to Ireland.


	3. Some Time After the Unending of the World

Glasses lined the countertop. Raphael woozily counted them. Four, five, six… Not drunk enough. She waved the bartender over for another Jameson, ‘Double, please,’ and downed it.  
She’d boycotted Ireland for a few centuries, after that argument with St Paddy about the snakes, but it was too good a place to drink. Uisce beatha. No demon would harass her in an Irish pub: Irish whiskey on Irish soil was toxic to them. Not as bad as holy water, but not pretty.  
Not that anyone would come looking for her here in the first place. Angels, as everyone knows, don’t drink.  
She ordered another.  
Hellfire. Hellfire without trial. An execution. She’d known Gabriel was off the deep end, but she hadn’t known by how far. And now his precious Plan – not the Divine Plan, as far as Raphael could tell that had been just fine, but the Plan in Gabriel’s head he thought was the same thing – now that had failed –  
What next?  
Screw it. Raphael concentrated for a moment, and sobered up.[1] She pinned a twenty-euro tip down with a beer mat and sauntered off, whistling along to The Fields of Athenry.[2]  
Once safely obscured by the dark, she headed Up.  
Raphael, Archangel and Beloved of God, had come to three conclusions.  
One: she had no way of knowing whether her decision not to interfere in events any more than she had (which had been just far enough to ensure the eleven-year-old boy on whom the fate of the world depended actually got to make a choice) should be categorised as “the right thing to do” or “idiotically reckless to the point of verging on insanity.”[3]  
Two: that was moot if Heaven, Hell or any combination of their forces working in harmony decided to take the choice out of humanity’s hands.  
Three: she wasn’t going to let them do that.  
She found a quorum of Archangels in the Council Hall, listening to the celestial rendition of Do-Re-Mi. Raphael glared them into silence before they could give her the heavenly equivalent of a headache.[4]  
‘Oh, good, the gang’s all here,’ she said. ‘We need to talk.’  
‘About what?’ said Gabriel.  
Raphael raised an eyebrow, and the heavenly choir made for the exits. Sandalphon continued whistling in a minor key until Uriel prodded him.  
‘About that whole ending-the-world business.’  
They clustered around her. Raphael almost expected Sandalphon to circle, so she was enclosed on four points, but instead he remained by Uriel’s shoulder. Michael looked nervous, Gabriel belligerent.  
He said, ‘I don’t know what you mean. We weren’t the ones ending the world. That was the antichrist. The other side.’  
‘Come off it, Gabe. Does that even work on the cherubim? Half of Heaven saw how eager you were to leap into battle. How much does it sting, that the boy chose the wrong way?’  
‘It’s not over,’ said Gabriel. ‘The Plan –’  
‘The Plan is done. Antichrist comes, antichrist decides, Earth keeps turning, the final reckoning waits until God gives us new instructions. It’s over.’  
‘It doesn’t have to be,’ said Uriel.  
Raphael turned to her. ‘And what if I say it does?’  
‘You would stand against us? We can’t allow that,’ said Gabriel. He pulled himself up, attempting to tower over her. Sandalphon and Uriel leered.  
‘What will you do?’ Raphael snapped. ‘Burn me? As you tried to burn Aziraphale?’  
Well. She’d tried telling them. Time to show them.  
The notion that demons keep their wings better-groomed than angels is, in general, not inaccurate. It is also exaggerated by the historical quirk that the angel more people have encountered than any other – excluding possibly a certain bookshop-owner – is Raphael.  
She spread her wings.  
Raphael’s wings for most of history had been (dare we say it) an unholy mess. Though she had survived Lucifer’s hellfire, which would have consumed a lesser angel, she had not been unharmed by it. The left coverts, subject to the full force of the blow, had melted together into a charred and unsightly lump. Other pinions had been torn loose or singed off at the edges. Across her wings as a whole all iridescence had stripped away to leave ashy half-grey, not as dark as a demon’s wings, far too dark for any angel.  
‘I was there at the battles of the Beginning. I withstood the fury of Lucifer himself. I have told you before, Gabriel. Do not forget who I am.’  
The other Archangels exchanged looks. She had not shown them her wings in millennia. They had thought her ashamed.  
Angels cannot heal injuries to their wings (which are fortunately hard to come by). They cannot heal themselves at all, it is said, because they cannot change or grow, or learn. An angel is fixed at the point of its creation or – if it proved imperfect, and is rendered a demon – at the moment of fall.  
‘Keep your precious plans and schemes,’ Raphael continued. ‘There’s a whole world out there. You don’t know a fraction of it. You’re scared of what you don’t know and you think because you’re angels everything that scares you must be evil and everything you do is righteous. And I refuse to be part of it any more.’  
‘What do you mean?’ asked Michael.  
‘I mean,’ – Raphael smiled – ‘I’m done with this holier-than-thou shit.’  
She concentrated, and healed her wings.  
Light sparked through the feathers, burrowing in between the injured quills, dancing across old injuries and the Archangels’ faces. A melody thrummed in the corners of their ears.[5]  
When she had finished, Raphael flared her wings out, clean and glossy and whole, and somehow bigger than they’d been before. New colours rippled under the grey. They dappled across the others’ shocked expressions.  
‘I SAID IT’S OVER. OR YOU WILL HAVE ME TO ANSWER TO.’  
When the echoes had faded, Raphael folded her wings. She ruffled them into place, fading into her form, and once again was a doctor in a lilac blouse and casual slacks.  
‘What,’ said Michael.  
‘How can you – that’s not possible. You’re an angel, you can’t – aren’t you?’  
Raphael shrugged. ‘If an angel is a representative of Heaven, then no. I won’t fly your flag any longer. But I am still what I am. You do not have the power to strip me of mine.’ She smiled, angelically. ‘It is possible. I believe it would be possible for all of you. Listen.’  
With that, she turned away from them.  
It took them a few seconds to process, a second more for Gabriel to call out, ‘Raphael!’  
‘Cheer up, Gabe,’ Raphael tossed over her shoulder. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’  
She left Heaven.  
The first place she went was the bookshop. It had been miraculously repaired, down to the finishing on the first editions. Aziraphale bumbled about, realigning spines with a mug of cocoa in hand. He froze when she entered. Raphael doubted he would recognise her, but angels know angels.  
‘Nice trick up there,’ said Raphael, throwing her coat on the back of an oakwood chair. ‘Though I suppose it’s your friend I should congratulate. You went the other way, I presume?’  
Aziraphale blanched.  
‘Oh, noli timere. I’m not going to rat you out.’ She clicked her fingers, and the lone customer in the shop felt a sudden urgent need for a sustainably-sourced fish supper.  
‘Who are you?’ said Aziraphale, eyes narrowed, at the same moment Ca – Craw – Crowley emerged from the back room.   
If Aziraphale’s reaction had been entertaining, Crowley’s was one she wished she could have recorded. He shut down so fast a pair of black glasses materialised on his nose.  
‘Raphael?’  
‘You two know each other?’  
‘We did some building work together,’ said Raphael. ‘Back in the day.’  
Crowley nodded carefully. ‘I don’t remember much of it.’ Raphael didn’t believe that for a wing-beat, but she decided to let him away with it. Some wounds weren’t worth reopening.   
‘What have you been up to?’  
‘Oh, y’know, bit of this, bit of that. M25.’  
‘That was you? Not bad. Evil, of course, professionally I have to disapprove, but I always admire craftsmanship.’  
Aziraphale cut in. ‘You’re an angel. You’re an Archangel.’  
‘Yes, and?’  
‘Archangels don’t go around saying they admire demons! It’s – it’s not done!’ (Crowley, to his credit, to theirs, didn’t flinch.)  
‘No? And what about you?’ said Raphael.  
‘I…’  
‘You’re still an angel. Haven’t you noticed? If this was the old days, for a fraction of the things you’ve done, you’d have fallen like that.’ She snapped her fingers with a puff of smoke. ‘Yet here you are, and here I am.’  
‘Well. God appears to be a bit less… hands-on about that sort of stuff than She was at the Beginning,’ Aziraphale muttered.  
‘What did you do?’ said Crowley, eyes narrowing behind the glasses.  
‘I resigned. Not as dramatically as you two, mind.’  
Crowley smirked. He’d always been a smirker. He could throw his whole body into a smirk, hands, hips, into every expression. Aziraphale by contrast seemed more restrained. Raphael knew something of what he’d done, and she could only attribute the seeming to plausible deniability.  
She leaned against a bookshelf. ‘Just thought I’d pop in and let you know. No obligations. But this – isn’t over.’ She spread her hands. ‘And when it does all kick off again, I’ve got a plan.’  
Um. Something like a plan. More like a match.  
They said something to each other in a language of raised eyebrows and nods that Raphael couldn’t understand. Crowley pushed the glasses a little further down his nose. ‘Glad to hear it. We sure as Heaven don’t.’  
‘Have you heard anything from…’ Hope quavered in Aziraphale’s voice.  
‘No. Nothing.’ Raphael sighed. ‘It is a given, of course, that God doesn’t make mistakes. But I have long wondered if she runs experiments.’  
The idea hung in the air between them, three cautious unbelievers who still held out a shred of faith. It crackled. No lightning came to strike them down.  
Aziraphale shifted from one foot to the other, staring pointedly at the Mary Oliver collections. ‘I couldn’t say. God is, of course…’  
‘Ineffable,’ finished Crowley.  
Raphael decided to change the subject. She could hear six thousand years’ worth of debate in that one word and, given Atlantis had just re-sunk, it seemed a bad time to dredge it up. A couple of tourists approached the bookshop and thought better of it. Outside, night had begun to fall. ‘What’s the boy like?’   
‘Bright lad,’ said Crowley. ‘Cares a lot. Pretty normal, really, apart from the antichrist thing.’  
‘Which has been successfully nipped in the bud,’ Aziraphale added.  
‘Loves his dad.’  
‘Good. Good people, the Youngs. Tadfield, wasn’t it?’  
She waited. Crowley got it first. ‘You bastard, Raph! Eleven years we babysat that human brat! I was a nanny!’ Aziraphale made an O with his mouth, and his eyes lit up. Crowley gestured at him. ‘Don’t start laughing, don’t you dare!’  
‘Come, now, it wasn’t that bad. You made a fine nanny,’ said Aziraphale. To Raphael: ‘Since you’re here, would you like a spot of tea?’

 

[1] No, she didn’t put the whiskey back in the bottles. She could have, but it seemed wrong to return it after it had been in her bloodstream.

[2] Since you ask: Raphael is not an exception to the rule “angels don’t dance”. She doesn’t suffer from the stupefying dignity that prevents most angels from so much as tapping along to the beat but she does, alas, have two left feet and very little spare time. She loves music, though. Even Fields of Athenry[2+].

[2+] It’s not that Athenry is a bad song, as folk songs go, in the same way avocado toast is not a bad brunch idea until you’ve been served it deconstructed in six hipster places running.

[3] She thought it might be the same sort of thing God was doing with them, but that hardly answered the question.

[4] This is exactly like a normal headache, except you can’t take Paracetamol because you don’t have a head.

[5] It might have been Fields of Athenry.

**Author's Note:**

> The “Crowley is Raphael” theory in question is the one by @the-reading-lemon and @carpenoctem-tharea (from what I’ve heard I think other people came up with it independently, but I don’t know who they are). 
> 
> Thanks for reading! This was fun. Watching the Good Omens fandom evolve over the last few weeks has been massively entertaining, as someone who loves the book but never realised it had such an active following. Of all the things to compel me to start writing fic again… But it’s really just a visit; I should return to my original fiction before it starts pining. 
> 
> Dedicated to Sir Terry Pratchett and a cookie for anyone who can tell me which Discworld characters Raphael is channelling here (I’ve spotted at least three).


End file.
